In my opinion their progress has been fantastic, and I am quite excited for the future of Linux smartphones.
You can actually get under $100 if you compromise the specs just a little.
There don't seem to be any builds anywhere for the 4.1 (is it an uncommon phone?)
For argument's sake, let's say you bought the 6.1, now your option is to download an "unofficial" ROM from some pseudo-anonymous person with an anime avatar from XDA, hosted on whatever free file hosting they can find today.
Don't get me wrong, I used Lineage when it was called Cyanogenmod, and it saved one phone from landfill which is great. But I'm older now, and I need my phone to work and work well - I really don't have time for problems like https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac85.... For some people, that's worth the money.
Edit: here's all the proprietary blobs that'd need to be reversed to be audited to make sure they're not selling you out, too - https://github.com/nokia-dev/proprietary_vendor_nokia/tree/a.... Props to HMD for publishing them, though.
I'm hoping to find an alternative for friends and family who still have the 5X - it's been dropped from Google's security updates for a while, because their support ends abysmally quickly.
More on topic, the LineageOS support requires a volunteer maintaining a buildable tree for the phone, and testing will require the hardware itself. I'm not sure how much CI/CD helps here.
The Nexus 5X supposedly has a maintainer with LineageOS, but maybe they're busy or no longer own the phone.
That's the great thing about open source! People form groups and spend their own time/resources to build what they want instead of waiting around for the corporate big brother to build it.
You aren't donating - any more than you're "donating" to Comcast when you pay your cable bill.
On the Comcast side, they can get fucked. My whole city pays them a crazy high fee for internet and more a month with very little improvements being made in infrastructure. Sure they now a have a remote with voice commands, but I and most people I know are almost never near the advertised speeds. At least the latency is good.
There is no fiduciary requirement to put profits above all else. In fact there is no fiduciary duty to make profits, just basically to do what's best for the company. There is no short term time frame listed. If there is a requirement to make profits it's not because it's a responsibility. Shareholders may want it but no one gets punished if a bad decision for the long term success of the company doesn't pan out. There's numberous examples of CEOs that attempted to pivot when it wasn't the most profitable course of events and then receiving a nice severance more than most employees make in a lifetime of work for failing.
You encourage what you measure against
Knowing what to measure against is harder the higher you go up the corporate ladder.
Incentives get skewed towards short term employees and short term rewards. Companies treating their employees as resources has only hurt loyalty. No one starts at a company in the US anymore unless they're average or below workers. The whole idea of companies not being willing to pay existing employees what they would pay a new hire is stupid too. You're willing to pay more for someone you're going to have to train and is a literal risk, versus a known commodity with known output. Generally you pay more for stability on the market not less.
The smartphone market is filled with phones subsidized by information harvesting money and where the economies of scale side with entities in a race to the bottom.
I’m personally happy to pay a premium for a product with different priorities.
By contrast, my PC is over 10 years old and runs the latest up-to-date versions of the kernel, drivers and other software. I'm hoping the Librem 5 will be similar.
I'd love to get rid of this thing full of proprietary stuff though.
Look at where the modern PC ecosystem is right now with windows: huge chunks of unusable plastic,fiberglass, and metal with serious software flaws that turn them into useless trash shortly after people buy them. When the community (much less, the individual consumer) can’t deal with broken software that’s tied to their (unupgradable) hardware it all just accumulates in landfills. People accept that you have to buy new phones and laptops every couple years because they have no other practical choice.
I’m not sure I could say one should have a higher priority than the other, in fact I’m almost certain I could say they can’t.
You don't have to toss it, you could sell it.
I applaud the open nature of this phone, but using the Gnome stack looks to me like a mistake.
> I fear this OS is destined to become like Samsung Tizen, which is riddled with security holes.
Is the gnome desktop riddled with security holes? I don't know much about tizen but they seem to have written a lot more of their own stuff, the vast majority librem is battle hardened.
> It's not as if we don't have excellent libre languages, e.g. Rust and OCaml.
Rust is not mature enough, especially in it's UI libs and is virtual unheard of outside the HN bubble. The most mature UI available appears to be the GTK bindings though so it's mostly the same stack that you think is a mistake. OCaml despite being older is even more unknown and from a quick google it's most mature UI library seems to also be an out of date GTK (https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk). Betting on either of those would be the death of the project.
> I applaud the open nature of this phone, but using the Gnome stack looks to me like a mistake.
Gtk and Qt are the only serious options as of today without having to sink in years of dev work. If anyone really wants to avoid C then there's the GObject system that lets you write code in js/python/xml/others, but I'm hoping this turns out to be the phone ecosystem that respects users and doesn't sacrifice their time and battery for the developers convenience.
What makes you think it's out of date? There is a gtk3 branch, gtk2 was used mostly because it was stable and cross platform. It's used by Coq, Unison, Frama-C, zeroinstall and others, and it's rock solid.
> Betting on either of those would be the death of the project.
Lolwat? What makes you think so? Rust Gtk bindings are official, and suggested to be used by Gnome team. OCaml is rock solid and used by the industry, for GUI apps as well.
get it together man. priorities. the value of an old phone stands up to forcing cash in meaningful directions? forget my wallet/welfare/bills, badd things have to stop at any cost.
When you show up, looking to do the legwork for a specific model, the community directs you to the donate button instead...
If Librem can keep their repos current? Im down to switch from a Lineage-deprecated phone.
Besides, a phone running a kernel that isn't 3 years old and terribly out of date? Vulnerable to Spectre, Rowhammer, and a host of other script-kiddie-hackable holes? So what if its "mine" for $200 less when it isnt mine and patched?
Apple did one thing well with iPhone that Android didnt - they kept themselves as a single point of accountability for how the phone runs, how it updates, how security patches get distributed.
A FLOSS phone needs to mimick that success.
Not as full-featured as Librem5 is, not as developmentally supported. But that's what the open source ecosystem is for, no?
Edit: [1]: https://postimg.cc/G9FVvQgm
I hope their around long enough for that sbc to be RISC-V based.
I am happy that they made the LTE connection an M.2 card that can be easily upgraded. But without a discernible upgrade path for the rest, this feels like it might not be enough for long enough.
With some rough finances, Im gonna have to save up. This phone will be nice enough at$700, and a Category ~15-ish M.2 LTE module should run around $100-$200.
I do want to see some reviews and tutorials though. A configurable web-app sandbox is absolutely necessary.
The way I see it the real value add for this phone is the software, and this whole mainline Linux, FOSS, run whatever you want approach is very attractive to me.
But is it worth $700? Is it worth $700 when my current phone is in great condition and most likely will be usable for several more years?
I feel bad, because I do want to support this kind of thing, I'm just not sure that buying __this__ phone is the right decision for me.